Saturday, November 03, 2007

Absence makes the heart &c.

This may be the lamest post I will ever write. But today, after a long separation, I was reunited with my one, true love.

Regional U., you see, does not have an EEBO subscription. When the library people came calling last year, asking us new faculty folk how they could make our lives better, I made a huge noise about how this was the ONE database that I really and truly needed. Possibly as result of that noise-making, our library began exploring the possibility of a joint-subscription program, whereby several of my state's non-doctoral institutions would band together to split the cost. Hurrah! said I. And hurrah! said the library. Hurrah! too, said my department--and voted to put a portion of our library budget toward the subscription.

But naaaaahh, said the history department--which does not have any faculty who specialize in the period EEBO covers.

Last weekend I was bitching about this to Augie, who finally said, "You know, you could just use my login."

So today, blogfriends, I did. But not only that! Her login gives me access to ALL the databases that her R1 school subscribes to, and the number is vast; I haven't had access to so many wonderful things since my INRU account went kaput two years ago. So I started surfing around, reading articles in recent journals that RU doesn't subscribe to; downloading PDFs of reviews I've written but never received copies of; printing off random facsimile pages from EEBO for my classes--oh, it was fabulous.

And that, my dears, is a Saturday afternoon in the life of your Flavia.

I was able to convince my library to cough up the dough for EEBO when I leveraged a trial run into a truly impressive user experience (my Western Civ students all used EEBO to learn about primary sources; my Early Modern British history students all used EEBO in their research essays; my senior seminar students used EEBO repeatedly; I also convinced two professors in the English department to build EEBO into their assignments that term).

Three years later, we're very, very happy with the ongoing user stats on EEBO at my rather modest, regional comprehensive U. Maybe you could leverage the same someday?

In the meantime, it's not an R1 library access but if you ever need something, feel free to ask me for access.

I am delurking entirely to say how much I adore EEBO. I was distraught for the three months of summer between my undergrad login expiring and my postgrad one starting. I tend to feel like it gives me an excuse for messing around on the internet. I'm not wasting time! I'm researching!

Flavia, you of all people should know that you do not by any means need to be apologetic about posting an account of your joyous reunion with such a profoundly important love-object.

I am also completely and totally and utterly beyond scandalized that INRU of all places didn't give you a subscription to its resources for life. The Petri Dish gave me one and I'm just a weensy thing and it's just a weensy place. And they have the gall to ask you for money! Pfffft. I spit on their Instantly Recognizable Haircuts.

Susan: you know, I don't, on a regular basis, have Library Envy--when I visited RU, I actually surprised one of my future colleagues by saying, after my tour of the library, "you guys have a pretty good collection!" (And, for the size/type of the institution that's true.)

But it's also true that one gets used to what one has (and to the workarounds involved: ILL, lots of acquisitions requests). Big Urban had a smaller collection and fewer databases than INRU. RU has fewer than BU. You scale down your expectations--until you're somewhere that everything is, suddenly, available again, and that's when you realize what you've been missing.

And Ancarett: posting a request for login on my blog would have been my next move, actually, had Augie not volunteered. But thanks for the offer!

In totally off topic news, I'm teaching MWMontagu's "Saturday - The Small-Pox" tomorrow and I actually gasped when I saw "Flavia" at the top of the page! :) Perhaps it's because you have a gorgeous complexion!